The Planetarium
by Nathalie Sarraute
On This Page
Description
A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the emotional lives of the characters in a way that surpasses even Virginia Woolf. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium reveals the deep disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way show more others see us. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
It is astonishing, how from a text about an elderly lady grieved by an inappropriate door-knob, with more suspension points than letters, after some 30 pages a novel of such structural beauty and precision emerges, authentic and realistic down to every word, a sad workshop in thought-hearing, well worth rereading most of it twice, thrice, spasmodically, paragraph-wise, sentence-wise, to understand whose head we have been placed in in this particular passage.
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Lists
Harold Bloom - The Western Canon: D. The Chaotic Age
833 works; 24 members
Author Information
Nathalie Sarraute has been an eloquent spokesperson and theorist of the new novel, as well as one of its most talented practitioners. In her essay on the art of fiction, The on The Age of Suspicion (1956), she condemned the techniques used in the novel of the past and took a stand beside Robbe-Grillet as a leader of the avant-garde. The novel, she show more feels, must express "that element of indetermination, of opacity, and mystery that one's own actions always have for the one who lives them." Her works have now become known to an international public. Her ability to render fleeting awareness and the psychological states underlying articulate speech has won both praise and disdain. Janet Flanner has called Sarraute "the only one among the New Novel experimenters who appears finally to have struck her own style---intense, observational, and personal." Of her novels, The Golden Fruits (1963)---about the Paris literary fortunes of an imaginary novel of the same name---is "the most barren of extraneous decor, the most accomplished from the standpoint of her esthetic aims" (SRSR). Tropisms (1939), her earliest (very brief) book, contains "all the raw material I have continued to develop in my later works." Her "tropisms," she says, are instinctive "sensations," or even "movements," "produced in us by the presence of others, or by objects from the outside world. [They hide] beneath the most commonplace conversations and the most everyday gestures." She regards her novels as composed of a series of tropisms of varying intensity. Sarraute died at the age of 99 in Paris, France. 020 show less
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Planetarium
- Original title
- Le Planétarium
- Original publication date
- 1959
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 317
- Popularity
- 100,273
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.54)
- Languages
- 8 — English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 15
- ASINs
- 14
